Review: The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice
 by L.C. Tyler
(2007 novel)

Posted on February 7, 2012 by D Gary Grady

Editrix: In what ways is writing a sequel different than writing an original? What particular challenges are there in telling a new story with familiar characters?

LC Tyler: Writing a series sometimes feels like traveling with an ever increasing number of suitcases.  You start the first book completely unburdened.  As you go on, each character brings a little more personal baggage from the earlier books.  Stretching this little analogy to (or a little beyond) breaking point, the reader becomes some sort of customs official with the right to open all of those suitcases, and to point out to you any discrepancy between what you claimed your characters were like in book 1 and what you were saying about them in book 3 or 4.  So, each new book in the series sends you scurrying back to re-read the earlier ones and check your facts.  And you are stuck with whatever dumb decisions you made before.  Of course, by that stage the characters are old friends, so you don’t mind too much carrying their stuff around.  (Elsie’s case is massive though – what does she keep in it?  Chocolate?)

Ed: The most distinctive style decision you made is setting off the opening sentences of several chapters as stand-alone paragraphs. How did you settle on that choice? What did you hope to accomplish with it?

LC: I’ve given this a lot of thought and the best I can say is: “As affectations go, it seems harmless enough”.

Ed: The first book is written mainly from Ethelred’s perspective. At least, he’s the opening narrator of The Herring Seller’s Apprentice. In Ten Little Herrings, it feels like the opposite is happening. What motivated that switch?

LC: I hadn’t originally planned to have Elsie as a narrator at all.  It just happened roughly a third of the way through the book.  Elsie sort of demanded to be allowed to speak.  In the second book, I wanted to start with an opening chapter that was, in a way, the mirror image of the opening chapter of Herring Seller – this time Elsie is in the flat and receives a mysterious phone call.  After that she hogs the narrative for a while until Ethelred can get a word in edgeways.  In the later books, I’d say the division was more or less 50:50.  I try to be fair.

Ed: Can you walk us through your research for a book?

LC: I did very little real research for any of the series.  My technique (such as it is) is to be as vague as possible about everything.  Wooly generalizations are very difficult to refute.  But occasionally I did have to check a few facts e.g. about stamps, which play an important role in the plot of Ten Little Herrings.  I had collected stamps many years ago (and still have them somewhere) so I did know a little bit.  After that, you can find out most things on the internet.  Oh, and you can talk to people who do stuff like that – stamps or whatever.  Once you find somebody with specialized knowledge they are usually happy to share it.

What I’m working on now (historical crime) is very different, though and entails long days at the British Library reading up on the sequestration of cavalier estates, the role of the village constable in 17th-century England, and many other things that I shall almost certainly never have a use for.

Ed: You originally had a career not connected to books or publishing. How did you make the jump from being one of the millions with an idea for a novel to someone who actually gets paid to write one?

LC: Luck, really.  I finished Herring Seller just as Pan Macmillan launched their New Writing scheme to find new authors.  I submitted the manuscript, and they took it.

Ed: Why mysteries? Are there any other genres that you’d like to tackle?

LC: I’ve always felt I write humor that happens to be mysterious rather than mysteries that happen to be humorous.  It was only when the policeman announced they found a body in Herring Seller that I realized that I was writing a mystery.  I have written one non-crime book – A Very Persistent Illusion – but it hasn’t been published in the U.S.  Other genres?  I’ve no particular ambition to write sci-fi or romantic fiction, though I might do straight historical at some point.

Ed: Can you describe your writing process? Do you work with outlines first, holding a plan for each scene? Do you come up with a basic idea and then improvise your way from there?

LC: Each book has been different.  There was pretty much no planning at all for Herring Seller.  With later books I tended to get the first few chapter down to get the general feel of it, and then write a detailed plan before carrying on.  What I have done with all of them, though, is usually to write each chapter in my head before I start typing it.  I also do masses of re-writing.  Some lines will have been re-written twenty or thirty times before I have a version I’m happy with.

Ed:  Do you work according to a set schedule every day? And what’s your writing area like?

LC: For a long time, of course, I had a day job as chief executive of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.  Writing had to be done at the weekends if it could be fitted in, or on holiday.  Now writing is my main activity, but I also sit on employment tribunals, which takes up several weeks a year.  So, I’ve never written every day.  I also couldn’t (for example) set myself a target of so many thousand words a day or a week because I spend so much time revising – after a full day’s work, the manuscript may be a couple of thousand words shorter than it was.  “Messy” is the best description of my writing area.  Let’s draw a veil over that one.

Ed: What challenges did you face in writing from the perspective of a woman?

LC: I think any writer should be able to write from the point of view of any character.  The thing is to make them consistent and believable as themselves, rather than a representative of a particular generation or sex or race.  I’m currently having much more trouble getting inside the head of a 17^th-century man.

Ed: Ten Little Herrings—even more than the original—plays with meta-fiction and storytelling, perhaps most obviously in the closing chapter when the reader is told, more or less, that the ending he reads didn’t really happen. But also, Ethelred walks the reader through the clichés and common knowledge that often comes into play in mysteries. Why did you think that mystery novels were ripe for this type of commentary?

LC: I know that the term “metafiction” may in itself be enough to put some people off a book, so I tend to use it with care.  Most people will in any case read the E&E series without the word occurring to them, though they may see the books as being slightly quirky and different.  Of course, a lot of humor borders on metafiction, in the sense that it asks us to take a second look at things we take for granted – in this case the conventions of crime fiction.  You can take this approach with pretty much any genre – but mystery readers seem to enjoy a wide range of styles, so I think there’s room for a bit of quirkiness.

Ed: What or whom would you count as your major influences? How much is Ethelred (or Elsie) based upon people you know?

LC: Humorists more than crime writers.  Mark Twain, Jerome K Jerome (maybe less well known in the U.S., but with a very similar style to Twain), P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Evelyn Waugh, Hunter S. Thompson.  I have stolen feely from all of these.  I often see Ethelred and Elsie as different sides of my own character.  Some people claim to know which agent Elsie is based on, but, in truth, I knew very few agents when I started writing Herring Seller.

Ed: What writing advice do you wish someone had given to you when you were starting out?

LC: If you are going to write a series, plan the arc of the series before you write book one.

Ed: Are there any plotlines that you played with but wound up needing to discard? Do you store up your discards – discarded characters, scenes, pieces of dialogue – in the hope of using them down the line?

LC: Most plot lines that get discarded get discarded for a good reason.  They are usually not worth saving.  Occasionally I will record some dialogue (maybe something overheard) in my notebook for use in a future book.  What you have to avoid doing is writing a whole scene just to have that as your punch-line.  It rarely works.  You often have to discard what seem (to you) to be great lines or even great chapters because the book as a whole is better without them.

Ed: In the language of reality-TV, are you on Team Ethelred or Team Elsie?

LC: I never watch reality TV if I can possibly help it …

It is an occupational hazard of my life as a book cover designer to almost never be able to read the books that I am covering. Whether because of time or timing, I always seem to rely on our felonious publisher to give me an idea of what a book is about and what the right feeling for the cover needs to be.

Although it would be a great thing—to be able to step out of time and read a book—and then turn the clock back on and design its cover, in reality, it probably works better this way. The job of the book cover designer, says, Chip Kidd, the award-winning associate art director for Alfred A. Knopf and patron saint of the profession, is to ask the question, “What do stories look like?” So someone in the process has to approach the book purely in visual terms, unencumbered by actual details.

In the case of Unnatural Fire, by Fidelis Morgan, the original direction included, “It’s very funny, it’s very bawdy…Bjorn Wiinblad did a lot of line-drawings of ladies in vaguely Regency-era clothing—bosomy, elaborate hair styles, Empire waistlines, big eyes, sharp chins, merry faces.” So off I went to research Bjorn Wiinblad, a Danish artist and designer whose work was popular in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, did indeed include, “whimsical round-faced people,” to quote Wikipedia, but they were all “dressed in vaguely 19th-century costume.” So, right feeling, wrong period. That ruled out repurposing actual Wiinblads.

We often dip directly into art history for our covers, for instance the finely rendered figures of Ingres for Kate Ross’s Julian Kestrel Series or the Fauvist fantasies of Redon for the Sheila Radley’s Inspector Quantrill Series. But sometimes literal quotation is not up to the task. I often have to remind myself that every period of history was once contemporary—was a now. So I went looking for an artist who had the whimsical line of Wiinblad, which I took to be a visual representation of the author’s amusing prose.

The first person I though of was the great editorial illustrator Edwin Fotheringham, who I had worked with occasionally but was mainly familiar with from his work in The New Yorker and other high-quality publications where he signed his illustrations, “Mr. Fotheringham.” Apparently you can call him Ed. Of his style, Ed says, “I continue to enjoy solving visual problems with blotty lines.” Perfect, I thought! When I contacted him and explained the direction, he wrote back, “We own a couple of illustrated plates by Bjorn Wiinblad. Funny.” So I knew right from the start that we were in the right hands.

Ed’s first instincts about the drawing were right, as well. The ”fabulously bawdy” Countess Ashby de la Zouche, is full figured and amply bosomed, curious and endearing. Her gesture tells you not only that she is a detective (the magnifying glass!) but what kind, a snoop, a voyeur—a gossip columnist! Alpiew is clearly subservient, and the lock of hair over her eyes makes it clear that she’s not the brain power here. And in overall composition we know immediately where we are (thank you, Big Ben) and what is going on. When he got to the color, the blue on blue night scene set the stage and the slash of candle light through the window indicates that there are secrets to be had here.

As Chip Kidd says, “Really, what the cover should do is get you to open the book and start to read it and investigate it. And at that point, the book is going to sell itself to you, or not.” What Ed has done for Unnatural Fire is to create that intriguing invitation to start reading. Fidelis Morgan can take it from there.

Anthony, Art Director

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In the world of mysteries, April is Edgars Month. Ordinarily we offer a special discount every month on one title, but for this month, through May 15, we’re offering a SUPER-special, Edgars discount on all three of our past Edgar nominees.  One of the things we like best about this group is that it’s such a splendidly mixed bag. You like a little giggle with your mysteries? Well, LC Tyler, author of the “Herring” books, recently won an award in England for “best humorous crime novel” of the year. You’d prefer a little chilly Scandinavian gloom? Missing, by Karen Alvtegen has been likened to both Steig Larsson and Ruth Rendell. In other words, there is some very good and very varied reading here.

When it’s going well, it’s like this.  You sit down at the keyboard and write for twenty minutes.  When you look up, six hours have passed and somebody has kindly added three thousand words to your novel.  When it’s going well, the real world fades into the background and the book writes itself.

When it’s going badly, it’s like this.  You can find 252 references to yourself on Google.  Your Amazon ranking is 25,473.  England are 225-4 against Australia.  Rain is forecast for Tuesday.  This is your fifth cup of coffee and it’s only 9.30.  When it’s going badly there is nothing on the internet less interesting than the next chapter of your novel.  You will make coffee for anyone.  If you’d like one, I’ll bring it round to you.  You’re reading this in Wisconsin?  No problem.  I got a Thermos.

When I write, I write in concentrated bursts.  Like most authors I used to have a day job and in those days the people who paid me expected me to show up at the office from time to time.  I wrote at the weekend when I could, but most of all I wrote on holiday.  While the family were on the beach, I was back in the hotel room typing away.  The maids would look at me pityingly when they come to do the room.  When the family met up again in the evening I would be monosyllabic over dinner because I had just realised that if Mrs Maggs knew about the secret passage then Annabelle would not have risked lying to the police, which blew a massive hole in my plot.  “The book’s fine,” I would say in answer to their questions.  “Just fine.”

Now writing is the day job, but old habits die hard.  I still tend to write in bursts between book signings and conferences and doing all the other things that my publishers ask me to do – and checking my Amazon ranking and the cricket score.

I write large chunks in my head in advance and dump it onto the computer when I can.  Long car journeys are a good chance to think through plots.  People sometimes ask me why my characters seem to spend so much time on the road.

When I start writing the first chapter I always know how the book will end, but I rarely make detailed written plans in advance.  I have a notebook in which I record names of characters, the chronology of events, bits of dialogue and so on, but most of it I just remember.  About 20,000 words into the first draft, I usually write the final chapter and then work towards the middle of the book from each end, like two teams of tunnellers, until the two halves meet.  Well, it works for me.

My first drafts are usually very short – little more than novella length.  Each successive draft adds ten to fifteen thousand words.  To begin with, it worried me that the natural length of my stories appeared to be around 45,000 words.  But after a while you develop the confidence that it will come right in the end.

Or, at least, I have that confidence up to a point.  Writers, like actors, can be quite superstitious, quite insecure.  If you don’t know where a gift has come from, you can never be quite sure that it won’t suddenly desert you.  Above all therefore I write in gratitude that I am still writing.

(Written in my head on the A40 between London and Oxford.  Dumped onto computer one Saturday afternoon.)

It’s 1953, and in England, a brave and bright new world is at long last about to dawn. The Depression is over, the vile, vile war is over, even the endless bloody rationing is whimpering to a close. In June the new young queen will be crowned (alongside, it must be said, her extremely dishy husband). It’s all so gorgeous that Mrs. Harriet Wallis, for one, can barely keep from hugging herself. Her husband has an important job with an important firm, the children are settling in well with the new nanny, even the new fashions are splendidly flattering. Really, life is about to be too wonderful for words.

Unfortunately, it is also going to be short. On June 3 the Wallis family will gather to watch the coronation on their bought-for-the-occasion television set. Mrs. Wallis, immaculately dressed, will put three bullets neatly into Mr. Wallis. And some months thereafter she will become the second-to-last woman in England to be sentenced to death.

The Second-Last Woman in England marks the U.S. debut of Maggie Joel. English by birth, Ms. Joel now lives and writes in Sydney, Australia, where The Second-Last Woman was first published (without the hyphen). Her novel The Past and Other Lies will be published by Felony & Mayhem Press next year.

A hilarious and old-fashioned whodunit romp in the mold of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, with just a tiny dollop of John Buchan thrown in for good measure. Highly entertaining and perfect reading for winter nights, Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess will keep you sweetly engrossed from start to finish.

New York Journal of Books

Although a very traditional English mystery, the characters are as entertaining, charismatic and all out fantastic as they were in the first. Mystery readers will want the adventures of Blotto and Twinks to continue for a very long time to come.

Feathered Quill Book Reviews

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‘With varying vanities, from every part,
They shift the moving toyshop of their heart’

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

The above quote is also the ending of Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop. Thanks to Felony & Mayhem, I recently discovered the joy of reading Edmund Crispin’s series of mystery novels featuring Gervase Fen, Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature, and amateur sleuth. Fen often involves himself and those around him in ridiculous and dangerous situations. His life is often in peril; often by murderers, but also by his own awful driving in his beloved car “Lily Christine III”. All of the books are wonderful, but if pressed, I’d say The Moving Toyshop is my favorite (I’m in good company; P.D. James ranks it in her top 5 mysteries of all time).
Seeking shelter after arriving late at night in Oxford, the poet Richard Cadogan stumbles across the body of a dead woman in a toyshop. After fleeing the scene, he returns with the police the following morning, only to discover the toyshop is now a grocery store and there is no sign of the corpse. Cadogan joins forces with the eccentric Fen to solve the mystery, and the two alternately sneak and roar through Oxford determined to find a solution.
What sets The Moving Toyshop apart from other English ‘locked-room’ or ‘cozy’ mysteries are its inventiveness and sheer wit; Crispin cheerfully breaks the fourth wall, having Fen frequently referring to himself as the hero of a mystery novel, and suggesting titles for the novel in which he is appearing. There is an irrepressible humor behind almost every line: “Among the altos, hooting morosely like ships in a Channel fog – which is the way of altos the world over …” (Note: Crispin was actually Bruce Montgomery, a composer and music director and well-acquainted with singers.) With vanishing evidence, an impossible murder, literary references and games (“Unreadable Books” is played by Fen and Cadogan while locked away awaiting rescue), a frantic final chase involving half of Oxford, and genuine suspense, The Moving Toyshop has it all, and deserves its standing as one of the top mysteries of all time.

Michael, Warehouse Manager

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The Edgar Allan Poe Awards (“Edgars”)

      Winners:

The Suspect (Best Novel, 1986)

      Nominees:

The Faces of Angels (Best Paperback Original, 2012)

Ten Little Herrings (Best Paperback Original, 2011)

The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice (Best Paperback Original, 2010)

Missing (Best Novel, 2009)

Black Knight in Red Square (Best Paperback Original, 1985)

By Frequent Anguish (Best First Novel, 1983)

The Spy’s Wife (Best Novel, 1981)

CWA (UK Crime Writers Association) Award Winners:

      CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel:

The Old English Peep Show (aka, A Pride of Heroes), 1969

Skin Deep (aka, The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest), 1968

Death’s Bright Angel, 1988

A Very Private Enterprise, 1984

      CWA Ellis Peters Award for Best Historical Novel:

The Innocent Spy (aka, Stratton’s War), 2008

      CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement:

Reginald Hill

Robert Barnard

Peter Lovesey

Julian Symons

Other Awards:

Macavity Award for Best First Novel:

The Killings at Badger’s Drift, 1989

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was. Specifically, it was a dark and stormy Friday night, which meant I was working at the bookstore, where I’ve been Miss Friday for going on 18 years. I had closed up shop, but was deeply disinclined to venture out into the wet. Why don’t I pick up one of these books that my partner has ordered from England, I thought. I’ll read a chapter or two, and then maybe the rain will have stopped.

By the time I looked up from The Herring Seller’s Apprentice, it was three in the morning. Oh nuts! I thought, I guess I’m staying the night. In fact, my complaints were purely pro forma: Staying up all night to read through this deliciously silly book in a single sitting was pure bliss. And in fact, it was a very nostalgic kind of bliss: It sent me right back to a time when for me, the right book was better than ice cream, better than cake, better than ice cream WITH cake.

And I’m far from the only member of Team Herring: We published the U.S. edition of The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice, the first in the series featuring Ethelred (a second-rate, sad-sack mystery writer) and Elsie (his superbly irritating agent), in 2009, and it was nominated for an Edgar award for best novel of the year in paperback original (more on Edgar awards in the blog). And the next year, just in case somebody had missed the message, the second book in the series, Ten Little Herrings, was nominated as well. And the year after that, Herring in the Library (that would be Herring #3) won England’s “Last Laugh” award, for the best funny mystery. You could say the books are pretty good.

Truly funny mysteries are very scarce (though sadly, mysteries by authors who think their books are funny, by authors who are trying very hard to be funny, are everywhere). For more from the truly and terrifically funny L.C. Tyler, please check back in a few weeks, when we’ll be posting our interview with him. For another gloriously funny series starring a lovable loser, try the “Charles Paris” series by Simon Brett (author of the “Blotto and Twinks” books), about an underemployed actor (with an agent who’s even worse than Elsie!). And if the awful Elsie has caught your fancy, you’ll enjoy Matricide at St. Martha’s, by Ruth Dudley Edwards, featuring the formidable (Miss) Jack Troutbeck.

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